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You will not find this information on a flyer sent home in your child's backpack. Test scores for the Terra Nova test have been released. In order to really understand the meaning of your child's test scores, you simply must plunge headfirst into a rather dry subject. We have created this guide to help get you through the process.

To critically examine your child's Terra Nova test scores requires some background information and some comparison scores, which you will need to request from your child's teacher or school. This article will help you prepare for the objective of gaining a solid understanding of your child's scores. During the October 13 Family School Council meeting and the October 19 meeting with CTB/McGraw Hill, our administration noted that extra face time with teachers would be allowed for parents requesting more information, so don't hesitate to schedule time with your child's teacher to go over test scores.

Let's briefly review the basics. Parents will receive Terra Nova scores expressed as a percentile. An overall score in the 50th percentile means that fifty percent of the hundreds of thousands of children taking the test nationwide will score higher and fifty percent will score lower. Note the tense in that sentence. Since not all of the tests nationwide have been given as of the period our children took the test, the percentile score your child receives is actually a statistical prediction of what percentile is most likely to occur. For our purposes here we will discuss the overall score, comprised of the reading, language and mathematics sub-scores. The same principles apply to all of the sub-scores.

A score of 50 percentile is defined as the national average. This is related to the bell curve often discussed, meaning that if national scores are charted on a graph most scores would be grouped in the middle and gradually fewer scores would be found in the lower percentiles or higher percentiles. The line on such a graph forms a bell shape. Remember, writers of this test want to create an assessment vehicle that results in such a bell shaped graph, so they purposely seek to include questions that their research shows are answered correctly only half of the time.

To critically examine your child's overall score, you will need to put the score into a context. We suggest two approaches in this regard. First, examining your child's score in the context of his own previous school performance will allow you to understand how accurate or inaccurate the testing was and it may also provide insight into your child's state of mind during the testing. Second, putting your child's overall score in the context of other overall scores from children in the same classroom and the same grade-wing will provide a means to further refine your understanding of what actually happened on test day. We'll go over the fine points of using each context below.

The context of previous performance

You know your child and you know his areas of academic strengths and weaknesses. The longer he has been in school, the more you know. From his homework, from his portfolios used in lower grades, from his performances on classroom tests and quizzes, from conversations with his teacher, from his report cards, and from similar sources you already have a clear picture of your child's academic progress. For our example here, let us suppose that your child is very strong in language and writing, he is at expected grade level in mathematics, he struggles somewhat with spelling and that, by and large, his teacher finds his progress satisfactory. In other words, your child's progress compares positively with what is expected at grade level and with his peers.

Now, consider the potential meaning of overall Terra Nova scores based on this background information. Incidentally, we will take the word of our administration that the Terra Nova is fairly well "aligned" with our Readington curriculum, thereby leaving out the possibility that test scores will be inaccurate due to information and strategies not covered in our schools. If the overall score of the child in our example is something between, say, the 45th percentile and 55th percentile then perhaps the test will verify what is already known. No new knowledge has been gained.

If the overall score for this child is much higher, say in the 60th to 75th percentile, then some questions are in order. You are confident in the real-world assessment of your child, based on years of previous data gathered from the sources mentioned above. Why would your child score peculiarly high? There could be several explanations. For one, your child may have been introduced to test-taking strategies, which are known to artificially raise scores due to awareness of test procedures rather than on true knowledge or ability. For another, your child may be in a classroom where extra support was given during the testing. Consider that some classrooms with students who have special needs might have the test proctor read the test questions aloud rather than have the students read the questions themselves. Another possibility is that the lessons in your child's classroom were, by design or by accident, particularly well "aligned" with the types of questions on the test.

If the percentile score is even higher than 75 for this child that we know by real world example to be in the middle of his peer group, then we must have real concerns. Either everything you thought you knew about this child based on years of experience is wrong, or there has been some degree of coaching for the test.

What of a score lower than the average; say in the 35th to 45th percentile? Again, based on what we know from the real-world experiences of our example child, this sort of score is cause for concern. The reason for the lower than expected score could be due to the child being a poor test-taker, or feeling stressed or under the weather on test day. It could also be due to the fact that the lessons taught in his classroom are normally evaluated through performance-based assessments, student projects and other hands-on measures and that the child simply does not have experience taking bubble tests. It is a strong possibility that the test questions did not relate well to the culture and life experiences of our example child, leaving him to question the questions themselves. The difficulty of urban minority children in relating to test questions is well documented, but the same principle can apply to country-suburban students such as those in Readington. Parents in our district come from distinct cultural, religious and regional backgrounds. It is not inconceivable that a child taking the Terra Nova could lack personal understanding of a picture used in a test question or lack the experience described in a reading passage for a group of questions. This would directly affect the score.

Suppose the overall score for our example child is even lower than the 35th percentile--even going down to a single digit percentile. Now our concern must multiply. For a child that we know from years of experience to be on target for his peer group to score this low can only mean that the child simply shut down on test day. Scores this low from our example child mean that he did not participate in the test, he was not able to perform at all on this type of assessment, or that he completely misunderstood the directions for taking the test.

Let's review so far. You understand your own child from many years worth of real-world examples. If your child's Terra Nova score corresponds to this understanding, you may have confirmed what you already know. If your child's score is much higher than what your understanding would lead you to believe, then it is important to determine if the reason is due to extra test preparation or classroom support during the test, if your child's lessons are overly-focused on test subjects, or if there are similar reasons for the disparity. If your child's score is much lower than what you would expect based on your understanding, it is critical to determine if your child "froze up" during the test, misunderstood the directions, or was feeling stressed or ill during the test period. All of these questions should be raised immediately with your child's classroom teacher, especially since precious months have already gone by from the time the test was given and the day you received the test results.

The context of the group

Having examined your child's test score against the knowledge you have of his previous real-world performance, the next step is to examine the score against the group of children who took the test during the same time. This will give you further clues as to the accuracy of the test results.

The percentile score your child receives is based on a prediction of how all students nationally will do on the test. However, what you need in order to further evaluate the accuracy of your child's score is the class level scores for your child's classroom, and the grade level scores for your child's grade in Readington. You will need to ask your child's teacher to show you these anonymous scores because this information will not be automatically included in the CTB/McGraw Hill home reports.

With the class and grade level scores, you can better judge if an unexpected score for your child is related to your child alone or to an issue that affects other students too. Let's say our example child from above receives a percentile score of 35. You are concerned because this is unexpectedly low. In examining the anonymous class level scores for your child's classroom, you note that most of the other scores are centered near the 50th percentile. When you examine the grade level scores you notice the same thing. Now you can deduce that your child had a bad day or has an individual problem taking this type of test. On the other hand, suppose the class level scores are all well below the 50th percentile, but the other grade level scores exhibit a more expected or typical range near the 50th percentile. Now you can deduce that something is different in your child's classroom. Perhaps this is the only teacher who did not resort to test-prep, or perhaps this teacher is focused on performance based assessments rather than simplistic bubble-test assessments. Further investigation is necessary to know.

In looking at class level scores, you want to compare what you feel is the relative accuracy of your child's score to the scores of others in the class. In other words, if you feel your child's score is off by twenty percentile either way, look at the classroom scores to see if they exhibit a typical bell curve centered on the 50th percentile. If they do, you must further examine your child's performance. If they do not and they are seemingly erroneous just like your child's score, you must further examine classroom issues.

Similarly, you must compare your child's class-level scores to the Readington grade level scores to make a determination if your child's class has any unique issues or if the entire grade, and therefore the entire test or the entire curriculum can be associated with a disparity from the typical bell curve centered on the nationally predicted 50th percentile. Without being able to compare your child's scores to class level and grade level scores from our district, parents simply cannot see the entire picture.

After critically examining your child's score and making some determination as to the accuracy, it is important to follow up with your child's teacher. If there is a disparity between real-world observation and the test score, find out why and make every effort to make sure the basis for deciding the future direction of your child's academic career is based on real-world observation and not a bubble test. It would be tragic to have a child be given overly advanced work, or provided with unneeded remedial support based simply on an inaccurate test score given one day in a Readington classroom and accepted without question by a teacher and the child's parents.